Virtual Special Issue on Soccer in Physics

Compiled by Constantino Tsallis, Editor Physica A

Soccer (or football, as its creators and many others prefer to call it) is an entertainment. It is also a sport. This is to say it is one of three human activities — sports, arts and sciences — through which athletes, artists, and scientists can show to all men and women something universal, something in which different people can collaborate and enrich all together. In contrast to activities such as military conflicts where humanity shows its worst side. So, soccer is sport, quite a lot of art, and a salt of grain of science. It is also great fun — see the attached photo! — a real party! The World Cup now running is of course great fun, and a fully international celebration, as we see everyday right now in Brazil!

Good quality science could not be out of the game, as several papers in Physica A, Computer Physics Communications, Communications in Nonlinear Science and Numerical Simulation, and in other journals, show. For instance, the paper Regularities in football goal distributions by L.C. Malacarne and R.S. Mendes, in Physica A 286, 391 (2000), illustrates this nicely. The authors perform an empirical study of the distributions of goals in league football championships in Italy, England, Spain and Brazil. They find the sort of distributions that typically emerge within nonextensive statistical mechanics, namely q-exponential distributions with an entropic index q close to 4/3, which they notice to be the same as for the number of citations of scientific publications. They further suggest that this fact could be related to anomalous diffusion, which in turn can typically emerge from nonlinear or inhomogeneous Fokker-Planck equations. Such intriguing connections are certainly very interesting from the scientific standpoint, and can ultimately lead to a deep understanding of a whole class of natural, artificial and social phenomena, possibly reflecting out-of-equilibrium universality classes. Dynamics, collisions, fluid mechanics, statistics, translations, rotations, all kinds of effects, stochasticity, relaxation, heat, wind, rain, a full feast for science to which the present special issue is dedicated: enjoy!